Top European Players Training

BGJ 146 Autumn 2008

Reviewer: Tony Atkins

ISBN 978-80-254-2611-1

Catalin Taranu is another one of those authors I know, but only a very recent addition to the list, as this is his first book. Some of you will remember him from Canterbury EGC in 1992, when he was a 5 dan. Since then he studied Go in Japan and entered the professional ranks and rose to 5 dan. He is now back in his native Romania and teaches and plays Go around Europe. There is a group of strong European players who have also studied Go in Japan, but not made pro. Five of these (Pop, Hora, Mero, Nechanicky and Silt) came together with Catalin for a weekend of study at the home of Vladimir Danek in Prague. The idea came from Jana Hricova and the book is published by PromoGo, the Czech Go promotion group that she started.

Over the weekend the players studied professional games together and played a series of games for analysis, with the idea of raising their standard to meet the challenge coming from Korea and elsewhere. The book contains 13 such games, with analysis by Catalin. Each has a good number of figures and diagrams, but the whole book only has 68 pages so is quite expensive for its price. However if you like to study games then it must be beneficial to study these top Europeans, and find out how they think and why they are so much better than use, without the problem that professional games can be too high a level.

The front cover shows the author seated on the floor going over a game from Go World with Christian Pop. The rear cover shows Pop and Ondrej Silt undertaking a different form of training on exercise machines. As the book says for good performance in tough games also physical strength is necessary.